Making sense of “heritage” from the bottom-up. An exploration of the places and spaces of Marghera (Venice, Italy)

The discourse on heritage management increasingly emphasizes the involvement of communities in the definition and maintenance of the cultural resources of their territo￾ry. However, these approaches to heritage still lack a thorough understanding of how a community may spontaneously develop a sense of place thanks to elements of their envi￾ronment that may not fit with institutionalized definitions of what is a cultural resource. This study seeks to provide clarity on this issue through an ethnographic research work that, drawing upon the literature on place and space, sheds light on how the residents of a peripheral town in Italy (Marghera, Venice) socially construct a set of cultural resources that are valuable to the community. The results of the analysis show that the community’s sense of place unfolds along three interrelated conceptual nodes: the relationship between heritage and the past implying an interplay between collective memory, history, and the present; the relationship between place and space representing the interplay between mean￾ing-making and material practices; the relationship between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms through which those meanings and practices may accrue or undermine the sense of place of the community.